Sagawa Kyubin, a trucking company, was growing quickly in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. In 1992, it was revealed that the company had made massive donations to politicians and that it used and made available to the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party the services of organized crime, the yakuza. The scandal forced the resignation of the party’s kingmaker, Kanemaru Shin, who was arrested in 1993 for possessing millions of dollars of unexplained assets. The size of the scandal could force fundamental changes in political fund-raising. Opposition parties, however, have not addressed the issues effectively, underlining opinions that they are not to be trusted with control of the government. For example, the day Kanemaru was arrested, the major opposition party, the Japan Socialist Party, spent their time discussing whether it should shift recognition from North Korea to South Korea.
